ARABIAN AND MEDIEVAL SURGERY 475 



time included removal of the testicle. He alludes to the use of gold 

 wire, a forerunner of the silver wire of our day. His inventions for the 

 reduction of fractures and dislocations were far in advance of his day 

 and many of these cases were cared for in hospitals. Virchow has told 

 us of the excellence of the hospitals in the thirteenth century, and of 

 the good care given to the patients. How Chauliac and later genera- 

 tions of surgeons came to accept the doctrine of the formation of laud- 

 able pus in wound healing, when at this period surgical cleanliness, the 

 use of antiseptic wine dressings, and the possibility of natural union by 

 viscous exudate were written on and discussed, is difficult to under- 

 stand. But even in Chauliac's time, surgery was becoming more and 

 more divorced from medicine, and the surgeons were ceasing to be 

 students. 



Chauliac was a genius living in an age of remarkable achievement. 

 Dante's "Divine Comedy" and Petrarch's sonnets were written in his 

 lifetime. Boccaccio and Chaucer were of his day. Giotto was painting 

 wonderful pictures, the great cathedrals were building and the universi- 

 ties were flourishing, and as Professor Huxley said in his rectorial ad- 

 dress at Aberdeen, in 1847, " probably educating in the real sense of the 

 word better than we do now." Portal in his " History of Anatomy and 

 Surgery " says : 



Finally, it may be averred that Guy de Chauliac said nearly everything 

 which modern surgeons say, and that his work is of infinite price, but unfortu- 

 nately too little read, too little pondered. 



This obviously extravagant praise is not discounted by Albutt who 

 writes : 



This great work [the " Chirurgia Magna"] I have studied carefully and 

 not without prejudice: yet I can not wonder that Fallopius compared the author 

 to Hippocrates or that John Friend called him the Prince of Surgeons. It is 

 rich, aphoristic, orderly and precise. 



Decadence in surgery began after Chauliac's death. His successors 

 seemed to think that they had little more to learn, and boasted, as each 

 generation does, of their progress. Wars and political disturbances also 

 came to distract men's minds, and study and achievement ebbed away 

 from the standard set by Guy and his immediate predecessors, until the 

 great flood tide of knowledge that came with the Eenaissance. 



References 



Nuburger. Gesch. Medizen. Tr. by Playfair (London, 1911). 



Walsh, Jas. J. Makers of Old Time Medicine (N. Y., 1911). 



Garrison, F. H. History of Medicine (Philadelphia, 1914). 



Original manuscripts, reprints and Aldine editions of the works of Arabian 

 and medieval surgeons were loaned for reference and exhibition through the 

 kindness of the Surgeon General's Library, TJ. S. A. 



